Adaptive and Efficient Key Extraction for Fast and Slow Fading Channels in V2V Communications

Securing data exchange between intercommunicating terminals, e.g., vehicle-to-everything, constitutes a technological challenge that needs to be addressed. Security solutions must be computationally efficient and flexible enough to be implemented in any wireless propagation environment. Recently, physical layer security has gained popularity, which exploits the randomness of wireless channel responses for extracting high entropy secret cryptographic keys. The current state-of-the-art relies on the independently varying channel sources of randomness, e.g., received signal strength (RSS) and phase. However, the limited capability of RSS-based extraction techniques has motivated researchers to investigate alternative approaches. Although phase-based approaches have emerged in many studies, optimising the extraction performance by adapting the algorithm to the non-reciprocal components of static and dynamic channels remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose an adaptive multilevel quantisation approach that adjusts the size of the quantisation region to the channel responses’ non-reciprocity parameters, thus optimising the trade-off between the bit generation rate (BGR) and the bit mismatch rate (BMR). The probability of error has been theoretically formulated. Accordingly, the order of the quantisation process is adapted for acceptable mismatching probability. Moreover, simulation analysis is conducted to prove the ability of the proposed approach to provide flexible adaptation of the quantisation order at different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), achieving fast secret bit generation rates 1. 1$\sim$2.85bits/packet at SNRs of 10$\sim$25 dB for acceptable BMR $\leq 0.1$.